I once thought that the soul was something abstract, a concept made by people to bear life and especially death more easily. I don't know when exactly the soul became a reality for me, something I feel vibrant, numb, comforting within me, around me, or sometimes painfully far.
'Follow your heart, your soul.' some said, but I mistook its calling for the voice of the mind with its little desires, fears, pleasures, and patterns.
It took several encounters with the warm, electrifying, light feeling of my soul to begin to differentiate between them, to recognize it intimately, beyond any fog or mental confusion.
The voice of the soul always comes with simplicity, clarity, and a certain dignity - it feels pure, untouched by power games or mercantile concerns.
Now, whenever I get stuck in the constructions of a mind that thinks it's too smart or too stupid depending on the shade of imbalance that left it with its wheels up on the side of the road, I acutely feel the lack of that original breath that animates me. I then start digging around in the toolkit I have at hand, feeling unnatural without the freedom of movement that a good body-mind-soul collaboration gives me.
I sift through everything that has gone before, but each moment being unique, that recalibration is temporary, superficial. It just keeps me in quasi-equilibrium, giving me moments of respite and even beauty... until I reach a certain despair, an inner saturation that makes me let go, put everything aside, and allow the natural readjustment of whatever short-circuited my system. Depending on how stubborn I am, the moment comes sooner or later, easier or harder, but it always comes.
After I become aware of my soul again, I discover, to my great and eternal joy, that it is still where I left it, just as open to me, with just as many gifts, and then some, after the wisdom of the processes that have taken place settles within me.
The real meaning of the experience I have gone through, which I feel to be true in the fiber of my being, generally comes later. But now, I have the advantage of knowing that it invariably reveals itself to me at some point, that whatever I go through, that thing serves me even if I don't know how exactly, I know that a pearl, a wisdom will be extracted from every experience, that it is not in vain, and that brings some comfort to the discomfort that comes with any change.